On the evening of May 10, 1941, Rudolph Hess, the Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party, parachuted out of a Messerschmidt Me 110 and landed in a field near Glasgow, Scotland.

This event took place at one of the crucial turning points in World Was II. I was 12 years old at the time and I remember being baffled by the news of what Hess had done. Why had Hitler’s second in command undertaken such a strange journey?

I could not find any motive for such a high-up Nazi to do something this weird. It fascinated me to wonder about what went on in his head. I also speculated how the amateur pilot could have pulled off a flight that had involved going through his enemy’s air defenses.

If I was confused by Hess’s flight, so was Hitler, except that he was also furious, and anxious about how it would be interpreted. He worried that Mussolini and his other allies would see it as an effort to make a separate peace with Britain.

That’s why Hitler authorized a nationwide radio broadcast on May 11, announcing Hess’s flight and branding it the work of a madman. Privately, Hitler felt shattered by what he saw as betrayal by one of his closest associates. It took him a whole week to resolve the resulting crisis.

My interest in this bizarre episode in World War II was stirred by reading about it in The Third Reich At War, the third volume of Richard Evans’s magisterial history of Nazi Germany. Discovering more about events you remember, way back when, often provides special rewards to readers like me.

This British historian provides details of the event that I did not know at the time. Hess’s real motive was to negotiate peace. “Delivering an agreement,” Evans explains, “would restore him to Hitler’s favour and secure Germany’s rear for the forthcoming attack on the Soviet Union.”

It took the New York Times two days to catch up with the news. On Tuesday, May 13, the Times printed a headline across the front page: HESS, DESERTING HITLER, FLIES TO SCOTLAND.” The second line read: “BERLIN REPORTED HIM MISSING AND INSANE.”

History shows these headlines to have been remarkably accurate. The accompanying story also did credit to the Times’s journalistic thoroughness.

So weird was Hess’s flight to Britain that Hitler’s insanity charge seemed realistic at the time. For the Nazis, of course, this explanation served the purpose of downplaying any serious purpose to the flight.

Claims of madness, however, brought its own dangers to Hitler and his regime. If a madman is second-in-command, how could his chief let that fact go unnoticed for so long?

The British authorities gave no credence to Hess’s proposal, confused as it was. He ended up imprisoned till the war was over, some of the time in the Tower of London. At the postwar Nuremburg Trials, he was sentenced to life imprisonment until, in 1987, at age 93, he hanged himself.

In the long run, of course, the Hess affair was to play only a very minor role in the war. The incident drew a lot of attention for a few days but ultimately would be seen as trivial. However, it excited my teenage imagination and held a certain interest as a compelling event in a war that the U.S. would enter seven months later.

My memory is not sharp enough to be certain, but I may for a time have considered Hess a hero. Though a Nazi, he had flown away from Germany at considerable risk. Perhaps he had repented and wanted to give up his Nazi ideology. And was he not landing as a peacemaker, a person who wanted to bring the war to an end?

Maybe my imagination was stirred by this event because it featured one man who dared do something wild. However misguided Hess was, he took an initiative that startled the world.

Very soon, these musings would turn out to be fantasy. Hess was judged to be a crackpot and had no credibility with the British to whom he surrendered in that Scottish field almost 70 years ago.

The punishment he paid for his exploit could not, however, stir much sympathy. After all, he professed an odious ideology that considered Jews and people of many other nations inferior and deserving of extinction.

Far from being a well-meaning eccentric, he was one in mind and heart with those who exterminated millions and, in doing so, subjected their victims to unspeakable degradation.

Of this criminal activity I was largely unconscious at the time of Hess’s flight. Only later would I come to know the awful reality of the Nazi-organized killing, a knowledge that would permanently enlarge my understanding of evil.

If the Nazis and their collaborators could act worse than wild beasts toward other people, how could I ever again look on myself and other human beings as largely good?

Richard Griffin